(Photo: Benjamin Runkle) Researchers from the University of Hamburg in Samoylov IslandPAGE21 young researchers have just started their season of permafrost investigation in remote areas, located in the northern hemisphere. First groups took off to Kytalyk and Herschel Island earlier this month. Researchers will come back to their home institutions at the beginning of September.

While collecting data on permafrost temperature, CO2 and CH4 fluxes, delegates from all the research stations, explain the particularity of the research done at each site. What is more they describe adventures, dangers and exciting daily life in remote tundra locations.

PAGE21 project aims to understand and quantify the vulnerability of permafrost environments to a changing global climate, and to investigate the feedback mechanisms associated with increasing greenhouse gas emissions from permafrost zones. This research will make use of a unique set of Arctic permafrost investigations performed at stations that span the full range of Arctic bioclimatic zones. The project will bring together the best European permafrost researchers and eminent scientists from Canada, Russia, the USA, and Japan.

The PAGE21 is a Large-scale integrating collaborative project under the ENV call topic "Vulnerability of Arctic permafrost to climate change and implications for global GHG emissions and future climate" (ENV.2011.1.1.3-1) coordinated by Professor Hans-Wolfgang Hubberten from AWI.